The loss of the frontier of 1814 to Prussia remained a sore point with France until it was swallowed up in the greater loss of 1871. When the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine in 1918 revived the question of their former boundaries, it was natural to inquire what the intervening century had brought forth. In the region of Landau there has been little change. A town of 5000 in 1815, it had grown only to 18,000 in 1910. The surrounding region of farm and forest had likewise altered little. The Saar valley, on the other hand, had shared the industrial development of the most prosperous parts of the Rheinprovinz. Its coal mines, and those of the neighboring villages of the Palatinate, had come to produce eight per cent of the huge output of the German empire. About this supply of fuel had grown up numerous industrial establishments--pottery and glassware to some extent, but especially blast furnaces and great iron and steel plants at Dillingen, Völklingen, Burbach, and Neunkirchen, busy on tasks of war as well as on those of peace. Great names in the German iron and steel industry stand out as the proprietors--Böcking, Röchling, Mannesmann, Stumm. Saarbrücken, a town of perhaps 5000 in 1815, had a population of 105,000 in 1910. To the north and to the west the lines of industrial towns were almost unbroken. 355,000 people now lived between the Saar frontiers of 1814 and 1815; and as many more in the adjoining regions which depended on the valley’s coal and manufactures. The Prussian railroad system threw its network over the basin. Prussian legislation provided houses and schools and social insurance for the workmen. Save perhaps for the beautiful state forests which ran to the edge of the towns and the mines, the whole character of the country recalled the great industrial region of the lower Rhine. Over the border of the Palatinate matters moved a bit more slowly, after the Bavarian fashion. The towns were not quite so spick-and-span, the model dwellings were not so much in evidence, the local capital, Zweibrücken, preserved the flavor of a _Residenzstadt_ of the old regime. But the flavor was German not French. In the western part of the valley French names could still be found, notably in Saarlouis, which kept much of the appearance of an old French town, with its hôtel de ville, its great public square, and along the river front the remains of its fortifications built by Vauban. And there were those who had not wholly forgotten that Saarlouis was the birthplace of Marshal Ney.